The Influence of Educational Attainment on Workplace Civility- Investors control corporate interests- Ban The College Degree Box?

This is a very good read, take that you Masters and PhD mofoo's, and we all wonder why 60% of Americas work force only has a high school diploma and in the current cut throat work environment, the low labor participation rate indicates these uncivil people in the workplace, including human resource computer input modulators, have the majority of the workforce sitting on the sidelines. As this article indicates, its only getting worse.

Research indicates that incivility, or subtle rude behavior, often stems from personal power inequities and flows downward, with those at the bottom of the hierarchy experiencing the greatest perception of incivility. This study used the Organizational Civility Scale (OCS) to survey residential property managers across the United States regarding perceptions of civility in their own organizations. The purpose of this study was to compare the perceptions of civility based on formal education level and the findings revealed statistically significant differences. Participants lowest on the formal education hierarchy reported a greater frequency of incivility, lower satisfaction with their workplace, and a lower perception of overall civility at work. The study provides additional insight into the relationship between power and incivility, which may add increased sensitivity of the issue and aid in the development of organizational incivility prevention programs. Suggestions for future research are also discussed

It is widely known that in many professions, a lack of formal education will limit job and advancement opportunities. But, is there another less recognized negative effect? The present article focuses on a comparison of the perceptions of organizational civility and workplace satisfaction in those with a college degree and those without.An individual’s formal education level can certainly influence their social status, but it may also sway attitudes and behaviors in interactions with others at different hierarchical status levels. Those at the top levels of the status hierarchy, with the greatest sense of personal power, may view and treat those at lower levels as status inferiors. As a result, certain negative behaviors may be perceived to be perfectly acceptable when they are directed at individuals at a lower status levels, but unacceptable when directed at those who occupy a higher status level. However, because overt mistreatment is socially, and often legally, unacceptable, individuals may turn to more ambiguous forms of mistreatment, such as incivility, in an attempt to maintain the existing power hierarchy.Incivility is differentiated from other forms of mistreatment based on its subtlety, low intensity and the ability of its user to deny any malicious intent (Pearson, Andersson & Wegner, 2001). It can include general rudeness, the use of condescending remarks, belittling the efforts of others, taking credit for the work of others, withholding information, or disregarding the feelings and opinions of others (Pearson & Porath, 2009; Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Clark and Carnosso (200 found that civility was generally found to be a positive attribute, while incivilityhad negative connotations and was seen as a deliberate means to exclude certain groups of people, placing a burden on some societal groups

Taken together, unacceptable behaviors and general incivility at work is perceived to be a major issue that is only getting worse. In a national poll, 75% respondents believe that incivility is getting worse (Pearson, Andersson, & Porath, 2000). Pearson and Porath (2005) polled 800 U.S. employees, 10% of whom reported witnessing incivility at work on a daily basis. In a national survey conducted in 2001 by Public Agenda, New York, 79% of those responding indicated that a lack of respect and courtesy is a serious problem that needs attention. In additional studies across 9,000 employees, Pearson and Porath (2009) found that 95% of those responding indicated they had experienced incivility at work.The following sections detail hypotheses that conceptualize the relationship between formal education level and perceptions of incivility at work. This research study does not attempt to provide a comprehensive measure of organizational incivility climate. Rather, it explores the possibility that the formal education level of an individual may be related to their perceptions of incivility within their organization. The comparison provides additional insight into the relationship between personal power status and workplace incivility.

New research from Harvard economist Lawrence Katz and Princeton economist Alan Krueger suggests that all the net job growth in the last decade is in "alternative work arrangements." That includes temps, on-call and on-demand workers, contractors at companies, independent contractors and freelancers. Online "gig" work like Uber is a tiny slice of that. The chart below shows the percent of workers in alternative work arrangements, by industry.

Job stability hasn't defined the American workplace for decades. Just ask anyone who has been escorted out by security in a mass layoff or whose factory moved offshore. In a global marketplace constantly upended by technology, companies are under unrelenting pressure to cut costs and maximize profits.

If companies can do business without permanent employees, they will. Technology and contractors make that easier every day, and companies are often rewarded for a lower headcount.

The economist Gerald Davis, author of "The Vanishing American Corporation," said investors often cheer layoffs.

"At minimum, Wall Street does not value having employees," he said. "At maximum, you might be punished."

Corporations have quietly been shedding permanent employees for years. Not just through offshoring and technology. American business farms out a surprising amount of work that used to be done in-house, from HR to IT, from marketing to maintenance. Witness the growth of the U.S. staffing industry, especially since the recession. The idea is to focus on "core competencies" and farm out the rest.

"Those at the top levels of status hierarchy, with the greatest sense of personal power, may view and treat those at lower levels as status inferiors..."

Well, duh! Hardly rocket science.

Poorly educated people in dead end jobs are unhappy with their jobs. No surprise there. I'm skeptical that education makes people snotty, which is the inference. I see association but not necessarily causality.

YVRguy said"Those at the top levels of status hierarchy, with the greatest sense of personal power, may view and treat those at lower levels as status inferiors..."

Well, duh! Hardly rocket science.

Poorly educated people in dead end jobs are unhappy with their jobs. No surprise there. I'm skeptical that education makes people snotty, which is the inference. I see association but not necessarily causality.

Fault?

The "corporate collective" has changed the education requirements over the years due to this perceived notion that "investors" are in global competition with each other. I don't think "investors" care how the corporate collective accomplishes this. One way to enhance the illusion of "doing better than" is to up the educational requirement in the workplace, a "bragging right" that corporations can feed to their investors. I have found, its not the education attainment level that makes people "snotty", its the educational institution itself that does.

What's the difference in a Bachelors of Science at Yale University vs. a Bachelors of Science at DeVry University? ..........Exactly

There is another hiring policy involving a box that is equally damaging to people who are trying to find employment, namely the way many employers now decline to consider applicants unless they have a college degree. Even if they have the knowledge needed to do the work or are just as trainable as a college graduate, the degree box keeps many who don’t have one from a chance at jobs other than the most menial.

Things weren’t always this way in the U.S. Earlier in our history, employers rarely concerned themselves with educational credentials. Only a very few jobs were foreclosed to people who didn’t have the right degrees. That changed rapidly starting about 40 years ago.

A key reason for the change was a Supreme Court decision, Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

Court decisions can have unintended consequences just as statutes or regulations can. Griggs has had a huge impact on higher education, giving the “college for everyone” movement a great but unanticipated boost.

In brief, the facts of Griggs: Duke Power Co. had a policy that restricted workers who hadn’t graduated from high school to the most menial jobs, such as janitorial work. The only way around that obstacle was to pass an aptitude test. Griggs and other African-American workers sued, arguing that the company’s requirements were discriminatory under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Unanimously, the Court agreed. It held that employers could not insist that job applicants have such educational credentials or have passed tests unless they could demonstrate that those requirements were reasonably related to the work. If a company’s educational or testing qualifications, had a “disparate impact” on minority groups, the firm was in violation of the law.

The problem is that the lack of a college degree now operates against people just as the lack of a high school diploma did in Griggs. People are shut out of many jobs not because they lack ability but just because they lack educational credentials.

In 2008, the Pope Center published “Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing” by Bryan O’Keefe and Richard Vedder. The authors explained that many employers, faced with the fact that aptitude testing had become legally hazardous and requiring high school diplomas was a red flag, began looking to college degrees as a way of screening out applicants they didn’t want to bother with.

“Griggs turned the college degree into a ‘credential.’ The content of the education did not change, but the degree—the sheepskin—became a necessary first step for a decent job,” wrote O’Keefe and Vedder. Businesses increasingly made the possession of a college degree (often, the substance of the degree being immaterial) the first obstacle for applicants.

Perhaps oddly, there were no challenges like Griggs to this new job qualification and we have now reached the point where college degrees are required for people applying for such mundane jobs as sales representative, rental car agent, and production supervisor. I’m not saying that those are easy jobs, merely noting that learning them doesn’t call for any advanced academic study in preparation.

Traditionally, such jobs have been filled by people with no more than a high school education. Now, they’re closed unless you show a college degree on your resume

Quite a few people see that “credential inflation” is a serious problem.

One of them is law professor and long-time critic of America’s college mania, Glenn Harlan Reynolds. In his June 6 USA Today column, Reynolds advocates “banning the college box.” That is, prevent employers from asking job applicants if they have a college degree, just as regulations in some cases ban them from asking applicants if they have a criminal record.

The justices in Griggs thought they were simultaneously applying the Civil Rights Act and helping to make life more fair for people who didn’t have high school credentials or good test-taking abilities. Little did they suspect that a consequence of their ruling decades later would be to keep such individuals from having a chance at numerous jobs just because they lack a college degree

And the logic of the case seems every bit as applicable to college degree requirements as to the sort of job requirements the Court struck down in Griggs. If companies violated the Civil Rights Act when they set arbitrary and seemingly irrelevant educational requirements for employment in 1971, why are they allowed to use the absence of college credentials to screen out people today?

With many politicians demanding that the criminal record box be banned, it seems reasonable to say that the college degree box should also be banned. Reynolds, who is about as far from a leftist as you can go, writes “So if you want equality, the best thing to do is to ban employers from asking students where they went to school and, perhaps, even if they went to college at all.”

So this is how and why the middle class is disappearing at an alarming rate, up-ing the educational work requirement for no apparent reason other than country wide "bragging rights" among other industrialized nations, corporate America is leaving millions of workers behind, the incivility in the workplace will just continue to get worse for those in the old working class paradigm

Back in the 80's we had a term for this, putting the word "engineer" on the back of any word makes it 'more important'

The jobs that have been created since the Great Recession have almost entirely been filled by the college educated, according to a new study

The vast majority of the jobs that have "come back" in the aftermath of the Great Recession have been low-skill, low-wage positions for which millions of workers are overqualified, or so the narrative goes.

The jury's out on whether that's actually true. There's some research that supports this idea, but other analyses paint a drastically different picture. One such study published this week by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce suggests newly created jobs since the recession have been filled almost entirely by highly educated Americans. Of the 11.6 million jobs created between January 2010 and January 2016, 11.5 million went to folks with at least some form of college education.

"By contrast, workers with a high school diploma or less hear about an economic recovery and wonder what people are talking about," the report said. "Of the 7.2 million jobs lost in the recession, 5.6 million were jobs for workers with a high school diploma or less."

The recovery between January 2010 and January 2016 has favored workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher the most," the study said. "Of the 11.6 million jobs created so far during the recovery, nearly 75 percent have gone to people with a Bachelor's degree or higher."

Effectively 99 percent of these new jobs have reportedly gone to workers with at least some college experience.

"Meanwhile, the number of jobs for workers with at least some college has steadily expanded. The number of jobs held by workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher has more than doubled since 1989, from 26 million to 54.2 million," the report said. "In 2016, for the first time ever, workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher comprise a larger proportion of the workforce than those with a high school diploma or less

Ultimately, the study found that those with a high school diploma or less now account for only 34 percent of the domestic workforce, while the share of those with a Bachelor's degree or higher account for 36 percent of the labor market and earn 57 percent of the nation's gross wages. Including those with associate's degrees, Americans with post-secondary education now make up nearly two-thirds of the country's employed

It can certainly be argued that during the Great Recession, employers had the opportunity to up the requirements of some low-skill, low-wage positions when faced with a glut of jobless Americans looking for work. They could essentially recruit more skilled employees who might take a step down in their careers for the sake of getting a steady paycheck. So the trend highlighted in the Georgetown report could be a result of traditionally lower-skill positions now expecting more out of prospective applicants.

But the more alarming take away from the report is that the labor market has never been more treacherous for individuals without a college degree. The Census Bureau estimates less than a third of Americans over the age of 25 have a Bachelor's degree or higher, while about 88 percent have a high school diploma.

theonewhoknocks saidWell someone's angry about being uneducated and unemployed

And this is somehow funny? Well at least we know, with the evidence here, that republicans blaming Obama's government for the low labor participation rate is just more lies and BS by them, when all the evidence points to republican establishment stall worth's who control corporate America and their policies or interests. If those with high level degrees, for chump jobs, are the only people "working", then I guess the 'rest' make up those who are not participating (the highest in 35 years) just because 'they do not qualify' under the new corporate, global competition rules.

Then its really no surprise here then that those who have been 'benched', most with a high school education, normally democrat supporters, are now supporting Trump. You can clearly see whats going on here, class warfare, through education (those who can afford) the establishment republicans are attempting to rid America of the middle class. The middle class was not created as a result of higher than needed education requirements. Unless this plan was hatched by both parties, which I doubt, corporate America's educational globalist plan is a failure.

Republican establishment and their corporate cronies has certainly earned their Trump wrath, now that part is funny. What is not so funny, the republican establishment has put so many 'under educated' people out of work, many within their own party, then as political usual, blame the democrat current in the white house. While republicans 'scorn' NATO, lets look at this most over looked 'reason' so many want to contribute but cant get the jobs they once did, before the new educational requirement for that same job took over. Republicans and corporate cronies continue to suppress wages to keep profit margins steady, but that is changing we see, $15 min wage. I feel really bad for Generation X, who missed the higher educational attainment requirement just as the Baby Boom did, many Gen Xers are those not participating in labor force while the older Baby Boomers start to collect their retirements